Flying Sweden [uDG 2011]

Hello all! I'm a new participant in the uDevGames contest, but have followed it for many years. I, along with my artist TK, are hard at work on this year's entry: Flying Sweden. We hope you like it!

About the Game

Take the helm of Sweden, the world's most deadly flying country, and battle for supremacy of the skies!

Flying Sweden combines strategic city building gameplay with fast-paced tower defense combat. Construct and upgrade buildings, gain resources, build larger guns, bolster your defenses and take on the hords of enemies waiting for you in the clouds.

Here are some screenshots:

Lots of buildings!

Sweden fights!

Sweden battles Flying Denmark.

Giant robot battle

Flying Sweden fights Odin in Valhalla

Plenty of things to build!

Development

Flying Sweden is being created in Unity3D Pro 3.4, and will be released on the Mac (of course) and Windows.

The Team

Will Miller (me) - I'm a professional game designer, and have worked in the industry for several years. I have had the pleasure of working on some really great games, including Guitar Hero II, and Civilization IV. I currently work at Big Huge Games, where I am a systems designer on an open-world RPG called Reckoning. I love game jams, and am really excited to be participating in uDevGames this year! Follow @willrmiller on Twitter for updates!

David McDonough I'm also a professional game designer of several years. I started at Firaxis helping to make various Civilization titles before coming to Big Huge to do systems design for our upcoming epic RPG, Reckoning. In addition to the occasional game jam, I dabble as a professor teaching game design at the University of Baltimore.

TK - I'll let TK flesh this one out when he has time, but he's a great artist from Sweden, and I really love working with him. TK works a day job packing massive quantities of fish into boxes, and makes games with me in his spare time.

(Aug 20, 2011 12:52 PM)Skorche Wrote: So will this be a pixel art game? Just curious why you chose Unity 3D if that is the case.

If I were making a tile-based pixel game, I probably would have rolled my own tech. For this game, though, Unity was the best tool for the job. It lets me iterate quickly on gameplay, and easily get new content into the game. I can also deploy to many of different platforms.

Very rough numbers pass on buildings - price, population requirements, HP, etc. Won't know how well these numbers work until the battle portion of the game is working. (You can see the spreadsheet for this here, if you're interested)

Transitions to and from battle mode

Coming up:

Buildings will have guns. You'll be able to aim them in build mode.

Battle mode. This week, I'm going to focus on getting battle mode working. Waves of enemies will appear, and you'll be able to shoot them. They will shoot you.

Once the game has a working battle mode and win/lose conditions, I'll start posting builds! Until then, here's a development screenshot:

(Aug 26, 2011 08:26 AM)funkboy Wrote: I think a brief tutorial on how to make Unity work well for a 2D game would be a seriously interesting article.

I'd love to do that (or see that done). I'll definitely include what I've learned about making 2D games using Unity in my postmortem.

There are several extensions (purchasable on Unity's Asset Store) which help out quite a bit in this department. The most notable are Sprite Manager 2 and 2D Toolkit (I use 2D Toolkit). Both of these will automatically generate sprite atlases for you, handle sprite animation, and efficiently batch your sprites when rendering. They both also support pixel-perfect sprite drawing from either a perspective or orthographic camera. 2D Toolkit also supports bitmap fonts in several popular formats.

Beyond authoring and drawing the sprites on the screen, you can make a 2D game with Unity in much the same way you'd make any other Unity game. As I mentioned in an earlier post, doing tile-based sprite games would require some extensions to the Unity editor to make map authoring practical, but this is still probably easier than writing an editor from scratch. You could also write a custom asset importer that handles files from Tiled or something similar.